The line manager group in a fast-growing climate tech business was caught between investor-pace expectations from above and the operating reality below. Over six months I ran a three-phase High Performance Programme that redefined what good looked like, rebuilt the OKR system underneath it, and gave the managers the standing to challenge upward.
The brief that came to me looked tidy on paper. Define a new High Performance value and embed it across the line manager group. In discovery it became clear the real issue sat one layer up. The managers were trying to deliver against OKRs that were really task lists, with priorities that shifted weekly, while taking confused signals down the chain to their own teams. The CEO was reasonably asking for performance velocity. The managers had nowhere to land that ask.
I agreed the engagement needed to do three things in parallel. Define what high performance actually meant for the business. Fix the OKR system underneath it. And give the managers the confidence, language, and group standing to have proper conversations with the senior team instead of absorbing the confusion.
I ran the programme in three phases over six months, each building on the last.
Phase one opened with a High Performance Scorecard the whole manager group completed, giving me a shared baseline of where they thought the bar was and how far below it the current operating reality sat. I then ran a set of workshops to define High Performance as a working value, not a wall poster. Concrete behaviours, observable trade-offs, what it looks like when somebody is and isn't living it.
Phase two turned to the OKR system. Diagnosis first, then redesign. I worked through every team's OKRs and quickly found the same pattern: tasks dressed as outcomes, too many of them, edited mid-quarter without clear ownership. I rebuilt the system around fewer, sharper objectives with measurable key results, then recommended OKR software to hold it. The client adopted it.
In parallel I delivered SBI feedback training to the full leadership cohort. Situation, Behaviour, Impact. A clean framework managers could carry into one-to-ones the next morning. The exercises forced practice on the conversations they had been avoiding, including upward.
Phase three was the part the original brief did not contain. Diagnostic work had surfaced friction between the managers and the senior team that needed addressing directly. I facilitated a mediation session that put the two groups in the same room, surfaced the cross-group concerns, and ended with agreed working principles. One-to-one coaching followed for most of the cohort. A wash-up workshop with the managers, attended by the HR lead and CEO, closed the programme.
At the final wash-up the managers rated the programme an average of 7 out of 10 for usefulness, and the things they pointed to as having shifted were the things I had been trying to shift.
Goals and priorities are clearer. OKRs are being used by managers to set boundaries with their own teams and to challenge non-priority requests rather than silently absorb them. Feedback tools from the SBI training are being applied in live one-to-ones. A monthly forum between the senior team and the managers is now in place, giving the managers visibility into senior thinking and the senior team a regular read on the operating reality below them.
Individual feedback was strong. One manager described it as the best training he had been through and sent an unsolicited follow-up to that effect. Another became a visible internal advocate for the High Performance value. An ROI summary for the CEO is being written using a re-run of the High Performance Scorecard plus a fresh survey to quantify the shift.
The frustrations the managers are honest about are also worth recording. OKRs remain a live system to be managed, not a fixed answer. Decision-making in meetings is sharper but not yet consistent. Mixed signals from the top still surface from time to time. These are the next layer of work, and the managers now have the standing to name them.
The biggest learning from this engagement was the difference between the brief on the page and the work the system actually needed. The business thought it had a values problem. It had an operating system problem, with the symptom showing up in the managers as fatigue and quiet disengagement.
Multi-phase programmes give me the room to find that out. A single workshop on High Performance would have produced a defined value, a set of behaviours, and very little change in the underlying conditions that were making high performance impossible. The fact that the OKR redesign, the SBI training, and the senior-team mediation could be added inside the same engagement is what made the value definition stick.
The lesson I am carrying forward into future multi-phase proposals: pre-work discovery calls with both the manager layer and the senior team, surfaced separately, would have shown me the friction earlier. Going in I would now expect to find it, and design the mediation work into phase one rather than reaching it in phase three.
Most work like this starts with a 30-minute call to understand the team, the context, and what good would look like. From there we agree the shape of the work together.
